Friday, April 27, 2018

Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is
Possible recently won the Story Prize, an annual book award “honoring the author of an outstanding
collection of short fiction" with a $20,000 cash award. However, if you check
the Amazon page for the book, you will see that Random House has subtitled the
book “A Novel.”

I realize that I am
probably one of the few readers who gives a hoot about the genre issue of whether
a book is called a collection of short stories or a novel made up of related
chapters. However, in my opinion, whether one reads a piece of fiction as a stand-alone
story or as a linked chapter does make a difference.

Random House subtitled Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible “a novel,” emboldened perhaps by the success
of her 2008 collection of stories, Olive
Kitteridge, which they subtitled simply “fiction.”It is a common commercial ploy, since
publishers know readers do not particularly like anything labelled “short
stories.” I read and commented on Olive
Kitteridge when it came out, for it won
a Pulitzer Prize that year, and they don’t usually award the prize to short
story collections, even those parading as a novel.

The recurrent appearance of the grouchy schoolteacher Olive sometimes
seemed to me to be a gimmick to justify the “novel” designation. She is the
central figure in some stories in Olive
Kitteridge, but is only referred to in others. Strout’s idea for the book was to present her in
relationships with several different people—her husband, her son, her
neighbors, her colleagues, etc.—and thus reveal her to be more complex than any
one person thinks she is.Sometimes this
device works; sometimes it seems forced, especially when extreme events are
invented to reveal Olive’s hidden nature.Sometimes you like her; sometimes you think she is a bitch. You never
really know what makes her do the things she does.All you can say is, “That’s just Olive.”
Although Olive Kitteridge has been compared to Winesburg, Ohio,
in my opinion, it did not take the kind of chances, either in style or content,
that Sherwood Anderson’s collection did in 1919.

Anything is Possible also has
a linking gimmick to justify its “novel” designation—the recurrence, occasionally
in person but usually by reference by someone who knows her--of Lucy Barton,
the central character in Strout’s 2016 My
Name is Lucy Barton.I posted a blog
on that work, commenting on the genre issue of the difference between novel and
novella. Here is a quote from that blog:

Many readers and critics
may very well fuss that generic terminology matters little or not at all,
noting that “a rose by any other name” blah, blah, blah. I would argue that it
matters a great deal in terms of what kind of experience readers are in for
when they pick up a book called “short stories,” “a novella,” or “a novel.” I
agree with C. S. Lewis, who once said, “The first qualification for judging any
piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is – what
it was intended to do, and how it is meant to be used!” If one does not
formulate some means of knowing this, then one can say nothing to the purpose
about it, and indeed may run the risk of misunderstanding, or misjudging, it
entirely.

Reviewers have called Anything is
Possible a novel, a “necklace of stories,” a “story cycle,” a linked group
of “chapters,” a “tapestry of tales.” One reviewer said the book exists
somewhere between a short-story collection and a novel, while another said it
was both a novel and a collection of
interlinked short stories., but most agree with the reviewer who said while
each “chapter” can be enjoyed as a stand-alone short story, if you read them in
order, you will see they fit together like “tiles in a mosaic.” Andrea Barrett,
who has written brilliant short stories often linked together by recurring
characters, said in her New York Times
review that if you read Anything is
Possible as a collection of linked stories like Olive Kitteridge or like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, with which she and several other reviewers have
compared it, you would be missing a lot, observing that in this new book the character
Lucy Barton is the “emblematic writer whose work reflects their own lives back
to them.”

When I read Elizabeth Strout’s Anything
is Possible last year, I liked the
first stories: “The Sign,” “Windmills,” “Cracked,” and “The Hit-Thumb Theory”
better than the last stories: “Mississippi Mary,” “Sister,” “Dottie’s Bed and
Breakfast,” “Snow-blind,” and “Gift.” It was only after I had finished the book
and sat there staring at it that I realized why.The first stories I read as short stories;
the last stories I read as chapters in a novel.Why? Because the last stories made me aware that the characters I read
about in the first stories were interrelated, and thus I began to focus on the
whole book as a tissue of interconnections rather than the individual stories
as unified pieces of fiction.

“The Sign” is about Tommy Guptill, who lost his dairy farm in a fire,
for which he thinks he is responsible because he neglected to turn off the
milking machines.Lucy Barton is
introduced in this story as Tommy drives by the old Barton house with the sign
that read “Sewing and Alterations.” Tommy remembers Lucy as a student when he
was janitor at the junior high school after he lost his farm. He sees her book
in a bookstore.We also meet Marilyn Macauley
and her husband Charlie, who we encounter in other stories later on in the
book. Tommy goes to visit Pete Barton, Lucy’s brother, who still lives in the
old house. Tommy is a good man who has shown understanding and empathy with
Lucy and then much later with her brother Pete.

“Windmills” focuses on Patty Nicely, who hears about Lucy’s book and
buys a copy in the book store where she runs into Tommy. She talks to Lila
Lane, who is the niece of Lucy Barton, and at the end apologizes for calling
her a piece of filth. Her sister is Linda Peterson-Cornell, who is wealthy and
lives near Chicago. Patty loves Charlie Macauley, who is old enough to be her father.
The story ends with an emblematic scene of Patty and Charlie sitting on the post
office steps talking. Patty says that Lucy’s book makes her feel much less
alone. The story embodies this sense of empathy when Charlie opens his mouth to
say something, but does not, and Patty feels, “without knowing what it was—that
she understood what he was going to say.” She simply touches his arm briefly, “and
in the sun they sat.”

“The Hit-Thumb Theory” focuses
on Charlie Macauley waiting for a prostitute named Tracey in a motel, who needs
10,000 dollars, which her son, who is on drugs, owes to a pusher. The title
comes from a discovery Charlie once made as a child whenif, while hammering, he hit his thumb, there
was a split second when you thought, “Hey, this isn’t so bad, considering how
hard I was hit.” After that moment of false relief, there comes the crush of
real pain. Charlie gets Tracey the money and goes to a B&B. While sitting
watching television with the proprietor, Dottie, he thinks that more
frightening than pain are people who no longer feel any pain at all.He sits there and waits and hopes and prays,
“Sweet Jesus, let it come. Dear God, please, could you? Could you please let it
come?”

“Sister” is the story in which
we meet Lucy Barton in person when she comes to visit her brother, Pete, whom we have
already met.Vicky, their sister, shows
up and they take Lucy back to Chicago and then drive back home; at the end Pete
asks Vicky if she wants the new rug he

“Gift” brings back Abel Blaine, Dottie’s brother, in a kind of
“Christmas Carol” story.Abelhas a conversation with the actor who has
played Scrooge in Dickens’ famous tale.Abel has a heart attack and at the end thinks of his granddaughter
Sophie and her stuffed pony named Snowball. The big woman who comes to get him
in an ambulance he sees as his friend.This, the final story in the book, ends with the title of the book:

“Like his sweet Sophie
who loved her Snowball, Abel had a friend.And if such a gift could come to him at such a time, then anything—dear
girl from Rockford dressed up for her meeting, rushing above the Rock River—he
opened his eyes, and yes, there it was, the perfect knowledge: Anything was
possible for anyone.”

I have some reservations about focusing on short stories as parts of a
whole rather than as complete artistic entities in themselves. My worry is that
because of the notion that bigger is better, focusing on the sequential nature
of stories inevitably throws the focus on the novel side of the formula rather than
on the short story side.The question of
what makes a short story sequence something other than a group of randomly
assembled stories and also something other than a novel is worth
examining.I certainly do not want short
stories to be read as if they were sections of a novel.However, by the same token, I do not want
them to be read as “part” of an overarching sequence, a tactic that may result
in neglecting the unique characteristics of short stories as individual works
of art.

It troubles me that some critics have argued that readers have
misinterpreted individual stories because they did not take into account that
they have a book-length intertextual context.The very word “misinterpret” suggests that one cannot really read a
story from, say Winesburg or Dubliners, individually, but only
within the overall context of the sequence in which they were ultimately
published.

I admit there is a certain pleasure involved when you read a story and
run across a character you have met in a previous story.Such character reappearances create pleasurable
little shocks of recognition for the reader, a sort of “wow” factor that these
characters actually live outside the fictions in which they exist and have been
hanging around just waiting for another story in which to pop up.

However, in the Dec. 1, 2003 issue of The New Yorker, Louis
Menand, in a long review essay on John Updike’s The Early Stories, says
that if you try to name the sensation that an individual story delivers, you
might call it a general sense of“Whoa,”
which, he admits, is not exactly a term of art, but you know it when you feel
it--that shiver of recognition of the “whatness of a thing” being revealed when
you read “Snow was general all over Ireland.”

Basically, I guess, I prefer this “whoa” feeling when a single story
comes completely yet inexpressibly together over the “wow” feeling of running
across the same characters, settings, or themes in several sequentially
arranged stories.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

One of my readers recently wrote: “I’m looking forward to reading your
review of ’Cat Person.’ Will you write it?”

Well, now that it has been over three months since the story appeared
in The New Yorker and started a
flurry of reader response and literary criticism on the Internet (usually
called “going viral”), I reckon it is safe to make a few comments.

Josephine Livingston, the “culture staff writer” at the New Republic, wrote that many readers
wove the story into the ongoing conversation about sexual harassment, as if it
were a personal essay, noting that “as an approach to criticism” this turns the
story into a tool for “digging in the hole of reality, rather than an imagined
world that has its own rules.” I agree. And the rules that govern Kristen
Roupenian’s “Cat Person,” I suggest, are the rules that govern the genre known
as the short story, and that is what I feel somewhat qualified to talk about.

In the “This Week in Fiction
Interview” with Deborah Treisman, Roupenian said the story was based on an
incident with a person she met online and it got her to “thinking about the
strange and flimsy evidence we use to judge the contextless people we meet
outside our existing social networks, whether online or off,” adding that our
initial impression of a person is “pretty much entirely a mirage of guesswork
and projection.”

Roupenian, who seems to me to be pretty smart about her story,
says that much of dating involves an “interplay of empathy and narcissism: you
weave an entire narrative out of a tiny amount of information, and then, having
created a compelling story about someone, you fall in love with what you’ve
created.” I am certainly no expert on dating, but having some knowledge of the
short story, I recognize this as what underlies all love stories. You never
fall in love with the person, for you never really know the person; what you
fall in love with is the image you have created.

Constance
Grady notes on the website Vox what we well know—that the short
story is a medium granted “precious little respect — and now people barely
acquainted with it are holding up “Cat Person” as exceptional rather than
typical. Hackles rose, says Grady, not necessarily at the story’s readers, but
at the literary culture that makes it so easy to skate by on knowing the three
short stories everybody reads in 10th-grade English, and to treat the great
short stories that are written every year as afterthoughts.” Grady concludes, “regardless
of whether or not “Cat Person” is a great short story or just an okay short
story, whether it’s deeply subversive or highly problematic, it has been
exciting to see the cultural discourse revolve around a short story for a
spell. It’s a reminder of how immensely powerful and valuable fiction can be,
and why it’s worthwhile to pay attention to it and learn from it.”

Yes,
indeed, it was good to see so many people reading a short story and finding it
engaging enough to want to talk about it—something I (but very few others) have
been doing for years. I only hope it leads them to reading more short stories
for the riches they provide.

“Cat
Person” is, of course, about attitudes and behavior that lead two people to
move from being strangers to having sex. The primary perspective is the young
woman Margot, whose mind the reader is allowed to enter. The reader knows Robert
only by his behavior and Margot’s observations of him.

Although
many readers have been so impressed by Roupenian’s perceptiveness and the accuracy of her description of dating
attitudes and behavior in the story that theythought it was an essay about real life rather than a fiction about
invented life, I suggest that readers familiar with the conventions of fiction, especially short fiction, will
recognize that Roupenian has modelled her story as much, or more, from her
internalized knowledge of those conventions than from personal experience.Think of “Cat Person” as a variation of the
classic Beauty and the Beast story or the Frog Prince fairy tale, in which the
beast is, after all, still a beast, and the frog, even after the kiss,
stubbornly remains a frog.

There
is something “magical” about Margot’s willingness to become intimately involved
with Robert.She surprises herself by
giving in to his abrupt demand, “give me your phone number”; When he says “stop
fooling around and come now,” she puts a jacket on over her pajamas and goes
out to meet him. After having sex with him, she marvels at the “mystery of this
person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing.”Afterwards, although she wants to “ghost”
him, instead of sending her breakup text, she says she will get back to him
soon, thinking, “Why did I do that?And
she truly didn’t know.”

Margot
is the point of view of the story because she truly does not know why she
allows herself to become involved with Robert, although she thinks it has something
to do with his initially treating her like a young daughter, kissing her gently
on the forehead as though she were something “precious.” The fairy tale mystery
continues when she is turned away from the club for being under aged and begins
to cry, creating a kind of “magic” as Robert wraps his “bearlike” arms around
her. She sees him as a big lovable animal, sensitive and easily wounded.

However,
when the sexual encounter begins, she sees his soft, thick belly covered with
hair and recoils from it.When he makes
demands, she complies and when he looks “stunned and stupid with pleasure, like
a “milk-drunk baby,” she feels her power, thinking this is what she loves most about
sex. However, she finally sees him as a fat old man with his finger in her, and
her revulsion turns to self-disgust and humiliation.

I
think what Roupenian has done here is to competently capture the archetypal
encounter of how a young woman (Beauty) plays seductive roles with an older man
(Beast)—allowing herself to have sex with him, even though she does not desire
him. The spin on the mythic story here is, of course, that the Beast remains
the animal that he is—that all physical bodies who are merely human are ultimately—and is not transformed,
as in wish fulfillment fairy tales, by love.

“Cat
Person” is smoothly, transparently, written. It is smart and perceptive.
And, of course, it is timely, even as it is universal.But it does not have the mystery and
complexity that great stories have, even though it has the familiarity that has
captured the attention of many people who recognize Margot’s feelings and
behavior and even understand Robert’s anger at the end.

Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."